Most people, if they can possibly avoid it, do not wish to dwell on the darkness can burrow its way into the heart of man. Unless someone is compelled by the need to make sense of his or her existence by facing up to the darkness that is within and without, most of us will do what it takes to distance ourselves from frequent and deep reflection on the problems of evil. For those of us who are so compelled by the course of our life, we find all too often that even an examination and reflection on the problem of evil creates a great deal of difficulty in our life. Being someone who finds it difficult to sleep because I cannot turn my brain off easily (which is, I suppose, the downside of being a person who is sensitive to what is around me and a bit too reflective for my own personal well-being at times), I find it is often necessary to write at night to ponder about issues that would otherwise keep me awake at night.

Today a friend of mine sent me an article about euthenasia in Belgium, though there are plenty of dark stories that could be written, including the rather controversial case of the corrupt abortion doctor whose shoddy care led to the deaths of many women and innocent unborn children. One could even remark on a recent Ohio kidnapping case where a man has been charged with several hundred counts of kidnapping and one count of capital murder for the forced miscarriage of one of his own children conceived in rape. For fairly obvious and understandable reasons, the horrors that are inflicted on the vulnerable and helpless, especially innocent little children, are horrors that I find deeply troubling. We like to think of ourselves as an advanced civilization, but it does not take far to find deep cruelty and inhumanity in our ways, regardless of the level of refinement we would like to pass off to others.

When we examine the totalitarian wickedness of such nations as Hitler’s Germany or Communist Russia, China, and Cambodia, we find that their evil was easier to inflict because it was often bureaucratic and impersonal, and because those who were exploited and hunted were viewed as being less than human. Anytime we indluge ourselves in violence against others, especially on a large scale (and no one can deny that our genocidal hostility against the unborn or the rising threat of warfare against the elderly and indigent is violence on a large scale), it is first necessary for us to see those whom we wish to commit violence on as less than human. Whether we view them as property, as a mass of cells, or as some sort of less than human creature, the fact that we wish to see ourselves as good even when we are committing acts of evil requires that we tear down the status of the other so that we can still see ourselves as virtuous. Since no one feels the slightest bit guilty for having to get an appendectomy, those who wish to commit the same sort of removal on a living unborn child must reduce that child to the same level as an appendix. Likewise, those who wish to assuage any potential guilt for having prematurely ended the life of grandma must find some way of making it feel like an act of mercy instead of an act of violence.

Despite the fact that there are consistent patterns in the way that people seek to justify their actions to themselves and others by dehumanizing those whom they abuse and attack and claiming for themselves virtues that they do not possess, the fact is that humankind has a scary ability to invent evil. There are literally no depths that are too low for humankind to sink to when possessed of a depraved nature and possessed of the unwarranted belief in our own superiority and the inferiority and unworthiness of those whom we hate. Whatever period of human horrors that one wishes to examine, one will see that the inventiveness of mankind, which can be turned to so many good and noble purposes, can be twisted into demonic darkness without the moderating influence of obedience to God and love for one’s fellow man. While we may wish to distance ourselves from that darkness, none of us is immune from the fate of becoming an inventor of evil if we allow ourselves to be motivated in cruelty and abuse. The reminder that we are all capable of great evil ought to encourage us to behave with greater restraint and circumspection, and not to look down on those who are also fallen creatures created in the image and likeness of our loving Father above, young or old.